Nuclear safety and regulation

The NEA Committee on Nuclear Regulatory Activities (CNRA) Working Group on Operating Experience (WGOE) held a meeting on Maintaining and Transferring Knowledge of Operating Experience on 13 April at the OECD Conference Centre in Paris. Participants included regulatory authorities, technical support organisations, industry, and vendors. The following topics were discussed: strategies and tools for maintaining and transferring knowledge of operating experience; industry efforts in knowledge management and transfer of operating experience; and regulatory practices in maintaining and transferring knowledge of operating experience.

The NEA Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI) Programme Review Group (PRG) met at NEA offices on 27-28 April. The PRG comprises seven experts whose key objectives are to evaluate new activity proposals from the working groups as well as technical opinion papers (TOP) and reports, and to provide recommendations to the CSNI. Ten proposals and ten reports were reviewed. The PRG recommendations will be presented to the CSNI meeting in June 2010.

Nuclear science

The International Conference on Nuclear Data for Science and Technology (ND-2010) was held on 26-30 April on Jeju Island, Republic of Korea. The conference, which was the 11th in a series of conferences held every three years, was organised by the Korean Nuclear Society (KNS) and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) under NEA auspices. It attracted more than 400 participants. The objective of this series of conferences is to bring together scientists and engineers involved in the production and use of nuclear data for various applications. The topics covered during the conference included nuclear data measurements, nuclear theories and models, data evaluation and validation, integral experiments, and uncertainty quantifications for different areas of application. The important role of the nuclear data centres was highlighted and many papers presented at the conference covered NEA Nuclear Science Committee (NSC) and NEA Data Bank activities. The next conference will be held in the New York area in spring 2013. More information is available at www.nd2010.org.

A series of workshops organised by the NSC Working Party on Scientific Issues of Reactor Systems (WPRS) was held on 12-16 April in Pisa, Italy, hosted by Pisa University. The workshops were a continuation of earlier NSC activities in the area of light water reactor (LWR) transient modelling. Benchmarking of transient scenarios in pressurised water reactor systems, such as pressurised water reactors (PWRs) and Russian-designed pressurised water reactors (VVERs), are nearing completion. The results, along with previously completed studies for a boiling water reactor (BWR) transient, will form part of a general study which aims to establish a comprehensive framework for assessing uncertainties in coupled neutronic/thermal-hydraulic calculations. The study is coordinated by the recently formed WPRS Expert Group on Uncertainty Analysis in Modelling. More information here.

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